Wiki
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Release Date
January 1972
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Length
10 tracks
The album ( Cover designed by Gary Burden) is often mistakenly called Saturate Before Using. because the words appear on the album cover, which was designed to look like a water bag that would require saturation before its first use. For this very reason, Asylum Records executives suggested to no avail that the words be removed from the album cover and nearly rejected the cover art outright. The confusion over the title returned when the album was converted to CD format, when the words appeared on the spine of the jewel case as the album title
Browne explained further in a promotional brochure: “I had this water bag on my wall. Gary and I were discussing ideas over the phone and I said we could make it a water bag. It’s a canvas bag made of flax so that it expands when you submerge it in water, probably in the tire trough at a gas station, then when you pass through the super-heated Mojave desert, the water evaporates through the radiator grill to help the car stay cool. On my bag it said ‘Saturate Before Using’ on the back. When Gary mocked the cover up I said, ‘People are going to think that is the title of my album.’ Gary said, ‘No way, they never would think that. They would know that’s not part of it.’ After so many years of people calling it ‘Saturate Before Using,’ the record company finally believed that was the title and they put it on the spine of the CD.”
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